Software development engineer Jobs in Chicago, IL

Senior Software Development Engineer in Test (Sr.SDET Engineer)

About Master Tour

Master Tour is the industry-leading platform for live event and tour management, trusted by touring professionals, artists, managers, production teams, and crew to coordinate the complex logistics behind exceptional live experiences. Built by and for the people who power live entertainment, Master Tour serves as the operational backbone for modern touring, bringing together schedules, contacts, travel, production details, venue information, and real-time coordination across desktop and mobile. Master Tour is evolving beyond a system of record into an intelligent workflow platform for the live events industry, helping professionals work from shared truth, move faster, reduce friction, and focus on delivering memorable experiences.

The Role:

We are looking for a Senior SDET Engineer to own the quality strategy for Master Tour across desktop, mobile, web, and API. This role comes with a high degree of autonomy and ownership: you will be trusted to define and drive the quality strategy with very little handholding, setting standards rather than following a prescribed playbook. This is an engineering role, not a manual testing role: you will design and build the automation frameworks, define what "ready to release" means, and embed with a product squad to make quality part of how features get built rather than a gate at the end.

Our customers work show-day deadlines in venues with unreliable connectivity. Regressions do not degrade their experience, they interrupt a live event. You will be the person who makes the release signal trustworthy enough that we can ship confidently and often.
This is an ideal opportunity for a senior quality engineer who thrives with ownership and ambiguity, wants to define an automation strategy from the framework level up, and has both the autonomy to set standards and the mandate to make them stick. If you like taking a problem and running with it, this role is built for you.

Responsibilities

• Own the automated testing strategy across API, web, desktop, and mobile surfaces

• Design, build, and maintain scalable test automation frameworks and the shared utilities, fixtures, and test data that support them

• Define release readiness criteria and quality gates, and own the reporting that makes release risk visible to Engineering and Product

• Embed with a product squad: participate in design and shaping discussions early, and identify testability and risk before implementation starts

• Integrate automated suites into CI/CD pipelines so that coverage runs on every change and results are actionable

• Investigate failures, distinguish genuine defects from flake, and drive suite reliability as a first-class concern

• Partner with engineers to raise the bar on unit and integration coverage, not just end-to-end

• Review test code and mentor other SDETs and engineers on automation practice

• Contribute to defining engineering quality standards, tooling, and process across the team

Must Have

• 6+ years of experience in software engineering or test automation, with substantial time writing production-quality code

• Strong experience with JavaScript / TypeScript and modern automation frameworks (Nightwatch, Playwright, Cypress, or similar)

• Proven experience designing and owning a test automation framework, not only writing tests within someone else's

• Strong experience testing RESTful APIs, including contract, integration, and data-driven approaches

• Experience integrating automated testing into CI/CD pipelines

• Solid understanding of relational databases and SQL for test data setup and verification

• Ability to define a coherent testing strategy across multiple client platforms and articulate coverage trade-offs

• Experience working in Git-based workflows (Bitbucket) and participating in structured code reviews

• Comfortable working in a startup or fast-paced environment

• Experience mentoring engineers on quality practices

Nice to have

• Experience testing Electron desktop applications

• Experience with mobile automation, particularly React Native (Detox, Appium, or similar)

• Experience testing offline-first or sync-heavy applications

• Familiarity with performance and load testing

• Exposure to observability and monitoring tools (Grafana, Firebase, or similar) and using production signals to target coverage

• Experience with feature flag driven release strategies (LaunchDarkly or similar)

• Experience establishing a quality function in an organization

Salary Range & Description

We offer a competitive salary range of $120,000 – $140,000 USD. Final compensation will be determined based on the candidate’s experience, skills, qualifications, and overall fit for the role.

Benefits + Perks

We want our team to feel supported at work and beyond. Our benefits include:

• Medical, dental, and vision coverage
• Unlimited PTO
• In-office lunch every Tuesday
• Short-term disability and life insurance
• Flexible Spending Account (FSA) and Health Savings Account (HSA)
• Discounts for various other benefits, such as pet insurance

We’re committed to creating an environment where people can do great work while having the benefits and flexibility to take care of themselves and their families.

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